Sedo’s Great Domains auction from April concluded last week, and the auction closed with over $175,000 in sales. The high sale was Drill.com, which ended at $40,500. Apps.net was the second highest sale at 24,100 EUR. Yali.com rounded out the top three, closing at $23,000.

The full list of sales is below. I don’t believe all of the sales have been finalized yet, so there could potentially be non-closing sales, but here’s the full list of domain names that met reserve and sold.

About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has sold seven figures worth of domain names in the last five years. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest.

Comments (13)

I wish they would shit this auction down. These names sold for way less than they are worth because the don’t have the buyers. I have lost keyword domains in these auctions at GD being talked into zero reserve. If they cannot provide decent sales prices, then shut the auction down.

“These names sold for way less than they are worth because the don’t have the buyers. I have lost keyword domains in these auctions at GD being talked into zero reserve.”

////////////

The buyers at domain auctions are domainers, people like me and you. Rarely do names get less than they are worth at these events, typically people overestimate the value of their names, that is the issue. This is a venue for liquidating names you don’t want at prices your peers would pay, not attracting Microsoft.

So for those listing if you think you are going to get some amazing price think again, start with what the best offers have had for a name and think about that as a reserve or lower if you want to try and get the bidding really going.

I agree with Snoopy. When I was considering listing CallCenters.com at auction, I would have contacted all the companies on my own (well, in conjunction with Sedo) to make sure they know about it. People seem to bitch and moan about the lack of publicity at auctions and say that it leads to poor prices. Yes, Sedo should have some responsibility for attracting buyers, but at the end of the day, they will only make 15% and the domain owner makes 85%. Domain owners should find their leads and work to get their names in front of the right people. My feeling is that domain investors may bid a name up to wholesale market value, and the real value will be determined by an end user buyer who values the name at a greater price.

I agree with Bruce in one respect. The auction sites do a lousy job of promoting the auctions. There are names that I see that sell that I would have bid on but I don’t know about the auctions and I’m not going to check in regularly to see what is on auction (which is why if someone wants to put the effort in they can get bargains like at any auction). I regularly get emails from owners trying to sell me domains similar to ones I own but I never hear anything from the auction houses. They go for the no effort low hanging fruit in trying to sell domains. No creativity at all. Additionally the web interfaces suck when you are trying to locate a particular type of domain that you are interested in. And they are slow as well. There is plenty of room for improvement and that improvement would lead to higher domain sale prices even in terms of domains selling to domainers (who are easily identifiable).

I think there is a happier medium which I’ve mentioned before on my blog. I would be happy to pay a more generous commission if the auction house were to employ an end-user marketing division. So for example, you could have the choice to opt in for either standard commission (say 10%) for no end-user outreach, or say, 20% premium commission for active end-user marketing. I know many will argue that this is something the auction houses should be doing anyway, but I honestly dont think there is enough incentive for them to do it, as it is, at standard commission when you consider the cost-benefit of man-hours that need to be applied versus the added payout they could get from a higher sales price generated from an end-user at the standard commission. I’ve actually tried to do the rough math. Think about it. Sedo generated $26,250 in commission from this auction. They ran about 225 domains. That’s about $115/domain. Now assuming Sedo had to market each one of these 225 domains to end-users, and they spent 2 hours marketing each domain (*very* conservative number imo) … that would equate to 450 man hours. That means keeping 11 people employed for a week. Let’s say you pay them a salary of $25/hr, that’s $11,250 in payroll. That means you have to generate at least that much in commission just to break even, and at the current 15% that means the auction would need to generate an additional $75,000 in sales just to break even (under these conservative numbers). Really to make it worthwhile it’d have to be at least double that, $150,000 or more, or close to 100% on top of what the auction actually did. Now I’m not saying this is not possible, but from an actuarial standpoint maybe you can see why the auction house does not want to invest the labor into end-user marketing with this type of risk/reward. However with an extra incentive built in, in the form of a ‘premium’ commission, it may then be worth it. In this way, I think everyone would be happier. The auction gets a premium commission which justifies the added expense of the marketing team, the sellers get higher sales prices.

@Larry artfully said. For me, I started in 1997 before SEDO existed. When they first started, the BEGGED me to let them sell my keyword domains and they worked hard to promote the auctions. Now, the GD auctions are not even on the radar unless you are looking.

Bottom line IMO, they hav e gotten fat on our domain sales and think they have the market by the short hairs. Personally, I think they are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to relationships between domainers who supply the bread on their tables and themselves. They are inner focused and not domainer focused. I was an executive for 30-years and I can tell you, loosing the bond between your person who supplies high quality inventory and your company is death to any company. They need to promote these auctions and send out requests and notifications to their members. I have asked over and over from my SEDO rep, please shoot an enail when these auction are going to occur or occur. Well it is 15-years later and I am still waiting for the first email notification.

@Snoopy… Agreed but it does not let Sedo off of the hook from doing their job. I have an auction site myself that I own but nyone can buy it for $400 and install it. Jeez, if they spent $5k to put an add in th WSJ would it kill em?

Perhaps it’s a bad business model hiring an entire sales force so they sell the domains to the end user, but like Bruce said, would it kill them to put an ad in the WSJ.

///////////////

Auction houses have tried all this stuff in the past, it doesn’t work, endusers rarely buy random domains for sale, they typically need a certain domain at a certain time. Sedo should be targeting domainers with auctions in my view, that is the target market.

Advertise

Important Notice: Unless explicitly stated, Top Notch Domains, LLC does not endorse any advertiser on this website. Advertisements and links may take visitors to external websites. Top Notch Domains, LLC is not responsible or liable for products, services, or content found on any other website. See the DomainInvesting.com disclaimer for additional details and information as well as this website's Terms of Use.